DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Hand power back to Americans, tooUPON THE handing of power to his handpicked Iraqi government, President Bush said, "The Iraqi people have their country back." He said nothing about how long it will take for us to get our country back.
There are 850 US soldiers we will never get back, who died in an unprovoked invasion and occupation that was based on Bush's fraudulent claim that Iraq was prepared to attack us with weapons of mass destruction. We lost global credibility for years to come because by invading on false pretenses, Bush made America a remorseless killer. Bush's rallying cry in his so-called war on terrorism has been the 3,000 innocents who died on Sept. 11, 2001. The estimates of Iraqi civilians killed by us, from human rights groups, wire services, and defense policy think tanks, range from 3,200 up to 11,300, nearly four times as many civilians who died on 9/11. Even though Bush admitted that Iraq had no tie to 9/11, he has barely acknowledged the civilian carnage, let alone apologized. With no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, Bush's final excuse for his invasion was, "Iraq was ruled by a regime that brutalized and tortured its own people, murdered hundreds of thousands, and buried them in mass graves." With his silence on civilian slaughter, Bush behaved as if two wrongs could make a right. He said this week, "I think people are beginning to see that we were in fact, liberators." We were in fact liberators who turned villages into mass graves. Bush tried at every turn to keep Americans from contemplating the war's human cost. In Iraq, the military refused to make any estimates of civilian deaths, even as it issued specific, spectacular weekly numbers of "insurgents" killed, gallons of oil that were flowing, restored megawatts, reconnected telephone lines, reopened schools, and rehired doctors. "Health care expenditures are up 30 times over what they were under Saddam," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last week. Wolfowitz neglected to add how much of those "health care expenditures" were made necessary by our bombs. At home, the administration has maintained a media ban on covering the arrival of coffins from Iraq at Dover Air Force Base. The ban was established during the first Gulf War. The administration was so maniacal about fogging our view of the fatal finality that until very recently, even some families of deceased soldiers said they were blocked from the base. The Senate, in a primarily Republican vote, last week defeated a Democrat-led proposal to allow media coverage of the coffins being lowered from military aircraft. Confident that nothing could cut through the fog, the administration stopped counting the coffins. In a House hearing in April, Wolfowitz was asked how many US soldiers had died. He said, "It's approximately 500, of which, I can get the exact numbers, approximately 350 are combat deaths." At the time, 722 soldiers had died, 521 in combat. Continued... |
